Uncertain Chad asks “What’s your favorite dubious proof technique?” I just don’t have one dubious proof technique: I have an entire book of dubious proof techniques! Seriously, I have a book where I write them all down.
\n
\nBut if I had to choose a dubious proof technique that was my favorite, it would have to be “proof by logical exhaustion.” Now you might think that this means that I logically list all possibilities to prove something, a technique which is perfectly valid and not very dubious at all. No, no. “Proof by logical exhaustion” is where you put forth a chain of logical reasoning so long and so tedious that your opponent is sure to get lost in the argument and in exhaustion will concede defeat.
\nI like this proof technique because it reminds me of a manuscript I saw once claiming to disprove special relativity which used about seven or eight changes of reference frame. I mean the argument was wrong, but showing this left you pretty near brain dead from following the reasoning (and finding the hole in the reasoning.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Uncertain Chad asks “What’s your favorite dubious proof technique?” I just don’t have one dubious proof technique: I have an entire book of dubious proof techniques! Seriously, I have a book where I write them all down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-ha-ha","category-mathematics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}